With the advent of weather in 1.5, lightning strikes during rainstorms can set fire to trees, frankenstein pigs to zombie pigmen, and perhaps most insidiously of all, super-charge Creepers with blue electricity.

The minecraft wiki states that a supercharged creeper has a "stronger" explosion, and can kill the player much more easily. While "stronger" is unquestionable in meaning for blast resistance and raw damage, I was wondering if the explosion radius is actually increased as well?

How large is the explosion radius compared to that of a regular creeper?

*Note: anecdotal evidence may not be sufficient alone, as it may be difficult to determine "bigger craters because of more blast power" and "bigger craters because the blast power covers a larger area". It could even be both at once.

After posting my answer, I realized that you may have a different concept of "explosion radius", are you asking for the size of the affected area of a creeper explosion, or the distance from the player that they are able to start their explosion?
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zzzzBovApr 24 '11 at 3:02

@zzzzBov - part of the question was wondering if radius and strength were correlated. I was asking for the former, which you answered.
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Raven Dreamer♦Apr 24 '11 at 3:31

4 Answers
4

The power of charged creepers is 6 (data from decompiled source code), 3/2 powerful than TNT, twice powerful than normal creepers. But I then realized there were two definitions of "explosion radius" (for blocks and for entities), so I updated the wiki for your clarification.

In a word, The blast radius in the air for blocks of charged creepers is 10.2, and the damage radius for entities of charged creepers is 12.

Doing some tests with a 0 explosion-resistant block (redstone wires), here's the area that various explosions took out:

Creeper: 43

TNT: 81

Super Creeper: 161

Assuming the TNT is equal to "4" radius (which really means up to 7 according to the wiki...), then the Creeper explosion ("3" radius) should have taken out 81 * (3/4)^2 = 45, fairly close to what it should be, so the test doesn't give way-off results. Extending that to the super creeper, it's 81 * (x/4)^2 = 161, so x = 5.639, which isn't a very nice integer, but that suggests that the range is almost double a normal creeper, and significantly more than TNT.

Despite this test trying to figure out the explosion radius only, and while the redstone wires have 0 resistance, there is still some power taken away for every block that the explosion destroys. Stacking TNT will give a larger apparent blast radius in the grid of wires, but only up to a point, then nothing will change.

Do Lightning Creepers have a larger explosion radius than regular Creepers?

yes, by definition

Explosion radius: The distance from the center of a crater to the edge of a crater.

Blast Power†: The Blast Power of an explosion determines its blast radius. TNT explosion has 4 power, creeper explosion has 3, fireball explosion has 1.

As we know, the blast power of the lightning creeper is greater than that of a normal creeper. This means that the crater produced by the explosion will be larger due to the way in which blocks are destroyed by explosions in minecraft.

You do have to compare apples to apples. A normal creeper in sand will have a larger crater produced than a lightning creeper in obsidian. Typically the blast radii are calculated with the distance at which a player can be damaged by a creeper with no blocks in between them.

Your "explosion radius" definition doesn't seem consistent with the Minecraft definition, where it's the maximum range it has any effect on. If you stack up TNT and activate them at the same time, your blast radius won't change at all, but the power will double.
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Nick TApr 24 '11 at 3:04

the little bit of testing I was able to do resulted in slightly larger craters for 2 blocks of TNT. Note: the relationship between Blast Power and Explosion radius is not linear. 2x TNT will not make a crater twice as large.
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zzzzBovApr 24 '11 at 3:11

Why are you trying to use the crater size to measure explosion radius? If you want to measure the radius, use torches on a flat surface of obsidian.
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Nick TApr 24 '11 at 3:21

didn't have a flat surface of obsidian readily available. I did have a large beach that i could do some simple testing on though. I'll try the obsidian thing out. Do 3 stacks of TNT create a larger radius?
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zzzzBovApr 24 '11 at 3:27

No, increasing the number of TNT has no effect on the explosion radius. TNT has a maximum reach of ~7 blocks, regardless of how many are stacked up.
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Nick TApr 24 '11 at 3:28